Chapter One
The Apprenticeship of Willis Carto
For more than fifty years, Willis Allison Carto marketed racism and anti-Semitism as if they were the solution to all the world’s ills. Yet he routinely kept himself out of the public limelight and did business behind a maze of corporate fronts. Most often, what is actually known about Willis Carto’s personal life comes largely from the mountains of court documents he created over the decades. At the same time, his role inside the white supremacist movements was well known to his compatriots there. David Duke once told a conference of Aryan believers: "There is probably no individual in this room who has had more impact on the movement today in terms of awareness of the Jewish question than this individual ...Because he has not only influenced many of you individually . . . but he also has influenced the men and women who influenced you."1
Born on July 17, 1926, Carto recalled a Depression-era youth of thrift and enterprise in the Midwest. He mowed lawns in the summer, shoveled snow in the winter, and made deliveries on his bicycle for the local drugstore. From the basement of his parents’ house in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he made money operating a small handset printing press. Young Willis attended school in Fort Wayne. After graduating from high school in 1944, he served for two years with the army in the Philippines and Japan. Upon demobilization, he joined the ranks of veterans seeking a college education, attending both Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and the University of Cincinnati.2
An aggressive salesman from the start, Carto began his business life in 1950 with Procter & Gamble. He then worked as a Household Finance Corporation loan officer while living in San Francisco. From 1954 to 1959 he sold printing and coffee machines.3 In November 1958, thirty-two-year-old Willis Carto married twenty-one-year-old Elisabeth Waltraud Oldemeir. A native of Herford, Germany, she eventually took United States citizenship. They never had children. But she was a constant partner in their multiple endeavors.4
He also turned friends into enemies and litigated against both.
Carto’s first significant enterprise was a monthly bulletin he started in 1955. Entitled Right: The Journal of Forward-Looking American Nationalism, it promoted many of the anti-communist, anti-Semitic, and segregationist ideas then circulating on the far right. Editing and publishing under the rubric of a corporation named Liberty and Property, Inc., he developed mailing lists and made appeals for financial support. He became adept at expressing his ideas about race and nationalism in the pages of Right—either under his own name or through an oft-used pseudonym, "E. L. Anderson, Ph.D." Like an apprentice entrepreneur, Carto learned during those years many of the organizational skills that later set him apart from other white supremacists.
At that time he also launched a venture called Joint Council for Repatriation. Historically, "repatriation" was the idea that black people living in the United States could best be free if they moved en masse to Africa. Some abolitionists actively supported it during the period of slavery, and after the Civil War some American blacks did settle the territory that became Liberia. In Carto’s hands, however, repatriation was another thing entirely. And his correspondence from that period shows that he regarded it as a way to avoid desegregation and the assumption of full citizenship rights by black people. Carto sent out his first letter to a colleague on Joint Council stationery in January 1955—seven months after the decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.5 But the Joint Council died on the vine, and Carto subsequently tried to hide away his advocacy on this point.
Ultimately, Carto became best known as the chief of a multimillion-dollar outfit in D.C. called Liberty Lobby, the origin of which he dated to 1955.6 At that point, however it existed only in his mind, and it was two more years before he floated this idea with an article in his Right bulletin. "Liberty Lobby," he wrote, would ". . . lock horns with the minority special interest pressure groups."7 Carto imagined a great struggle, with himself at the center. "To the goal of political power all else must be temporarily sacrificed," he wrote.8
He shopped the Liberty Lobby idea to both conspiracy-obsessed anti-communists in the North and archsegregationists in the South, promising that it would "complement" their activity rather than supplant it.9
Preparing to focus on building Liberty Lobby, Carto closed down hisRight bulletin in 1960 and spent the summer working at the John Birch Society offices in Belmont, Massachusetts.10 A conspiracy-obsessed anti-communist organization with tens of thousands of members, the Birch Society did not share all of Carto’s ideological views, and it did not formally endorse his proposal for creating a Liberty Lobby. But a number of observers believe that Carto left Belmont with a copy of the Birch mailing list secretly in hand, ready to use it for his own fund-raising purposes.
Shortly thereafter, Liberty Lobby opened an office in the National Press Building in Washington, D.C. Carto named himself the corporation’s secretary-treasurer and hired a staff person, who began courting representatives and senators. A periodic newsletter, Liberty Letter, touted the operation’s activities. One of its early goals was repeal of reciprocal trade agreements,11 and Liberty Lobby’s nominal chairman, Curtis Dall, testified before the Senate Finance Committee in 1962. An "international cabal" supported free trade, Dall argued, and the "real center and heart" of this cabal was "the political Zionist planners for absolute rule via one world government."12 Substituting the word "Zionist" when talking about Jews became a hallmark of Liberty Lobby propaganda ever after, as "anti-Zionism" became a convenient cover for anti-Semitism.
One incident from those early years illustrates much about Carto’s personality and his relentless attempt to hide his political views. Looking like a mild-mannered model of middle-class probity in coat and tie, Carto walked into the Giant Super Store on Annapolis Road in Glen-ridge, Maryland, with two accomplices. Once inside the three split up, and each walked to a different section of the store. The thirty-six-year-old Carto grabbed a shopping cart and pushed it through the luggage section, stopping only to open suitcases, insert a fold-over four-inch printed card in each, and snap them shut again before he moved on. Continuing in the book section, Carto sensed that he was being watched. Grabbing his empty basket, he pushed to the front of the store and started to leave. But his path was quickly blocked by first one man and then several others.13
A small crowd watched as he was stopped and forcibly detained. Store detectives directed him to a stockroom, where he was handcuffed. The once properly dressed faux shopper now looked madly disheveled. By his own account, Carto "refused to cooperate in any way" and was treated like a "common criminal."14 From his wallet the detectives took the remaining copies of the four-inch cards.
"Always buy your Communist products from Super Giant" was printed across the front in red ink, beside a hammer and sickle. A quotation from FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and a list of household products were on the inside. At the time the United States and Soviet Union were locked in geopolitical combat stretching across the globe. The Western bloc and the Eastern bloc glared at each other over the Berlin Wall, which had just been built the year before. The Cuban missile crisis threatened to turn into a nuclear war. American "advisers" were starting to ship out to Vietnam. And Willis Carto was worried about Polish hams, Czech cut glass, and Yugoslav wooden bowls on the shelves at a local market.15 In the context of the Cold War, Carto’s anti-communist card passing seems bizarre, almost cartoonlike. But it was real. He was taken to a local police station, fingerprinted, and booked on a charge of disorderly conduct.16 Two months later he was convicted before a magistrate judge and fined ten dollars.17
Carto subsequently filed a civil suit against Giant Food, charging that he had been called a "communist" and a "Nazi" while being arrested and been "exposed to public hatred, contempt and ridicule." For each of twelve claims, he asked twenty-five thousand dollars, a total of three hundred thousand dollars.18 While the arrest itself did not expose much about the personality and politics of Willis Carto, his lawsuit ultimately revealed more about his personality and actual politics than he could have possibly wanted.
In civil cases of this sort, one of the first legal steps is known as discovery, a court-sanctioned investigation of the plaintiff by the defendant and vice versa, often taken in the form of oral depositions and written interrogatories. By charging that he had been defamed when called a "Nazi," Carto opened a door to questions about his own political beliefs, and Giant Food responded to each of his claims with a set of interrogatories: Where did the plaintiff go to school? Where did the plaintiff work? Describe all political affiliations. Has the plaintiff made political speeches? Where? Has the plaintiff written political articles? Please identify. Have you ever used any name other than Willis A. Carto? Questions he repeatedly tried to avoid, according to case records, but was eventually required to answer.19
Despite his multiple evasions, when the suit came to trial, the jury apparently had enough information to make a decision. Carto lost on all counts. Afterward the judge felt constrained to comment on the speciousness of his claims. "It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen," the Honorable Harrison Winter told the jury, "that only a very benevolent government would make available your services . . . for some four and a half trial days, and the services of the clerk of this co...
